The Atomic Future

Ten years after Hiroshima, 13 after man first split the atom, 1,200 atomic scientists from 72 nations filled Geneva's huge Palace of Nations last week with the excited babble of exploration and discovery. The first International Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy was a conclave of adventurous men and optimists caught up in the dream of a peaceful atomic revolution. "Now everybody feels he can talk freely," exclaimed the ranking U.S. expert, Atomic Energy Commissioner Willard Libby, a man seldom moved to excitement. "It's a great emotion—you can feel it all over the place."

In brain-straining technical sessions, in press conferences, even in the chatter of cocktail parties, the scientists exchanged information, ideas and prognostications on the power for good that lies in a power associated for so long with war. Mostly it was the sound, detailed talk of scientists to scientists—facts about Russia's 5,000-kw. showpiece reactor (TIME, Aug. 15), U.S. uses of radio isotopes in medicine and industry, Britain's plans to begin making commercial atomic-power reactors.

But the talk that most stirred the conference's first week was a bold prophecy by India's Physicist Homi J. Bhabha, 45, conference president. Bound by none of the security regulations that so often gag U.S. experts, Bhabha predicted that by 1975 man will have tamed the H-bomb's fusion reaction and converted its tremendous energy (more than 1,000 times that of the Abomb) to useful electric power.

Some scientists thought Bhabha highly optimistic, but he insisted that he was actually speaking conservatively, that fusion power might come even sooner. Would fusion replace fission in reactors? he was asked. Said Bhabha: "There will probably be a place for all of them. Airplanes have not eliminated railroads."

Gentler Triggers. Although Bhabha was the first topflight scientist to predict the coming of H-power, the prospect has intrigued his brethren everywhere (TIME, July 25). Present atomic reactors all use the fission process: splitting nuclei of the heavier atoms, e.g., uranium or plutonium, to produce a controllable reaction. But fusion, used solely in the H-bomb, involves binding the nuclei of far more plentiful, lighter atoms (deuterium, lithium, etc.) under tremendous heat to produce an explosion.

So far, only an exploding A-bomb has provided enough heat to trigger off fusion. But it is theoretically possible. Bhabha suggested, that other far less violent triggers can be fashioned to produce fusion without explosions. For example, high-voltage linear accelerators have been designed to propel particles at high speeds through electrical fields to give them high energy but little heat effect; a low-voltage, high-current accelerator shooting more particles at lower speeds might supply the few millions of degrees required for fusion. Even ordinary TNT "shaped charge" explosions might do the triggering. Already, said Bhabha. Indian theoretical scientists were making "reasonable progress" toward an answer.